A study from PHD students and a professor from Lund University (A university that offers a Human Factors and Systems Safety master program). This really interesting study looks at what happens when you take people from different backgrounds (maritime crisis management instructors, maritime students, professional sailors, civilian crisis managers, student pilots, and air traffic control students) and have them perform in a simulation of operating on a ship.

It goes over the various ways that participants chose to coordinate amongst themselves, how that was successful or unsuccessful as they proceeded through iterations of the simulation and even includes some quotes directly from the participants, talking about how they felt about it.

Lots to learn here about what teams really need to be able coordinate and what common ground really consists of in order to be effective.

Daniel Turner talks about two things that are close to my heart (no pun intended!), on-call and emergency medicine. Daniel talks about what he’s learned from research and from his wife who is a physician.

Daniel goes on to not only tell us what we can learn as software engineers who operate systems from the profession of medicine, but what perhaps we don’t want to drawn into our profession, like high levels of burnout and huge numbers of pages.

I first learned about HumanOps from Hannah Foxwell at REDeploy, and have been steadily learning more. Here is a look at how on-call could be redesigning, keeping in mind 4 of the 6 HumanOps Principles.

Specifically, David Mytton summaries the first 4 as:

Humans build & operate systems that have a critical business impact.

Humans require downtime. They get tired, get stressed, and need breaks.

As a result, human wellbeing directly impacts system operations.

As a result, human wellbeing has a direct impact on critical business systems.

That wraps up for this week!

What’d you think of the new format? Did it help you? Did you like it better the old way? Reply and let me know, I read every email.